The Library of Congress 2006 Literary season continues with poetry readings from poets Henri Cole, Liam Rector and Judith Harris. Carolyn Brown, director of the Scholarly Programs Office opened the reading. Patricia Gray, coordinator of the Poetry and Literature Center, introduced each guest reader.

Speaker Biography: Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956 and raised in Virginia. He received his bachelor's degree from the College of William and Mary in 1978, his master's from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in 1980 and his master's of fine arts degree from Columbia University in 1982. His volumes of poetry include "Middle Earth" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), "The Visible Man" (1998) "The Look of Things" (1995), "The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge" (1989) and "The Marble Queen" (1986).
Cole's awards and honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. From 1982 until 1988 he was executive director of The Academy of American Poets. Since then he has held many teaching positions and been the artist-in-residence at various institutions, including Brandeis, Columbia, Harvard and Yale Universities, and Reed College. Cole is currently poet-in-residence at Smith College.

Speaker Biography: Liam Rector was born in Washington, D.C. in 1949. He holds master's degrees from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
His books of poems include "The Executive Director of the Fallen World" (University of Chicago Press in 2006), "American Prodigal" (1994) and "The Sorrow of Architecture" (1984). His poems have appeared in Agni, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Boston Review, Slate, Ploughshares and elsewhere. His reviews and essays have appeared in magazines and books that include American Poetry Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, Hudson Review, Bostonia, The Oxford Companion to Literature and Contemporary Poets.
Rector's honors include fellowships in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he received the Friend to Writers Award from PEN New England. He has served as poetry editor of Harvard Magazine and as associate editor of Harvard Review and Agni. He edited "The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall" (1989) and co-edited "On the Poetry of Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page" (University of Michigan Press, 2007).
Liam Rector has taught at Columbia University, The New School, Emerson College, George Mason University, and elsewhere. He founded and directs the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College, and has also administered literary programs at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. He lives in New York City.

Speaker Biography: Judith Harris is the author of the poetry collections "The Bad Secret" and "Atonement," and the critical work "Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing." Her poems have been published in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Antioch Review, The American Scholar, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Southwest Review and Poetry Northwest. She has published extensively on poetry and psychoanalysis, and has had essays appear in American Women in Psychology, College English and Tikkun. She led the annual Frost Place Seminar in Franconia, N.H., in 2006. Harris has received Individual Artist's grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts. She teaches creative writing, literature and psychoanalytic theory at Catholic University and George Mason University, and lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and daughter.